Social media giant Facebook has been on the receiving end of a barrage of regulatory pressure since announcing its crypto project Libra earlier this year. As the digital ship starts to spring leaks before it is even launched, the rats are already deserting it.
PayPal Pulls Out
Global payments giant PayPal has announced its departure from Facebook’s Libra project as Mark Zuckerberg’s digital woes deepen. The blow is particularly painful for project lead David Marcus who once headed PayPal. It is the first major partner to leave the 28 member consortium just a few months after it was formed.
As the cracks in Facebook’s grand ambitions for global financial dominance begin to widen, the likelihood of Libra actually launching diminishes by the day. This latest move comes a few days after the WSJ reported that a few corporate supporters of the project were considering jumping the ‘crypto mafia’ ship.
In a statement to media the online payments monopoly stated;
“PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time. We remain supportive of Libra’s aspirations and look forward to continued dialogue on ways to work together in the future.”
Both companies profess to a benevolent mission in serving the unbanked, however both also make billions of dollars in profits from these ‘services’. The notion that they are no longer willing to work together simply highlights that a centralized profit driven digital currency is not the way forward.
PayPal, which made $15 billion in revenue in 2018 largely from transfer fees and forex commissions that are higher than most high street banks, added that it wanted to;
“continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratise access to financial services for underserved populations,”
Facebook, which made $56 billion in revenue in 2018 largely from advertising based on harvesting personal data, has also stated that its crypto project aims to serve the unbanked.
Regulators across the globe are right to be concerned about the increasing dominance of US tech monopolies which are driven purely by profit regardless of veiled statements suggesting otherwise.
Bitcoin by design is the total antitheses of both Libra and PayPal. It has no central profit driven controller and can truly help the unbanked when adoption increases and volatility decreases.
Two web monopolies failing to come to agreement on a centralized cryptocurrency is good news for Bitcoin which remains a bastion of freedom to those that truly want to escape from corporate and banking dominance over their personal finances.
